Kikiloa is Mitochondrial Eve, the 200,000-year-old mother of humanity and our lyrical first storyteller.
As a time surfer flickering across a trillion universes, she's determined to discover an antidote to entropy before everything meaningful is lost.
And now she's a freckled fourteen-year-old trickster bounding across a San Francisco park to meet her kind, grounded friend Hazel, who Kiki believes can cause even death to pass people by. Probably.
When a cliff collapses beneath them and Kiki vanishes mid-fall, Hazel is left alone with their attacker to begin her contemporary coming-of-age, while Kiki's hopes unravel back to the trauma of her bleak beginnings as outcast and slave in a dystopian prehistoric world.
But Kiki never lets up, whether lamenting a Hawaiian tsunami, alchemizing sniper attacks, telling quantum stories, weaving through highway pileups, going Jungian, or baking perfectly average cookies. And throughout, she spars with her infuriating, enigmatic mentor Paha, who believes surfing is elegy: all waves break, and fighting the end only creates suffering.
The Kikiloa Chronicles is Erik D. Larson's emotionally vast, funny, and wild speculative literary debut, carried by Kiki's unmistakable voice from the devastating loneliness of her first life to the hard wisdom of friendship. Irrepressible and imperfect, she wrestles with love, a force like gravity, alive at the core of a universe destined for darkness.
Circe meets The Midnight Library by way of Ursula K. Le Guin.
Reader reactions:
"I don't think I've ever read anything quite like this, not in scope or execution." - Ruchi, early reader
"I was immediately gripped and fully immersed from the first couple of pages. I didn't want to put this book down." - Jess, early reader
"Science in fiction in the spirit of Madeleine L'Engle. Defies genres beautifully." - Caroline, early reader
Fun. Fast. Deep. A voice you won't forget.
Content Note: This story contains scenes of natural disasters with loss of life, gun violence with young teens in danger, and sexual oppression in a dystopian prehistoric setting. The scenes are not graphic, but readers sensitive to these themes may wish to know in advance.
While there are teenage characters and strong adventure plotting, this is a character-driven literary novel for adults - and mature teen readers ready for it.
